


The Camping Trip

by wheel_pen



Series: Viridian Mal [38]
Category: Star Trek: Enterprise
Genre: Alternate Universe, Fish out of Water, Gen, Imprinting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-17
Updated: 2013-04-17
Packaged: 2017-12-08 19:28:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/765132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wheel_pen/pseuds/wheel_pen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Why would anyone on the Enterprise think a recreational camping trip would end well? They never do. This story is unfinished.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Camping Trip

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Viridians appear human, but are actually aliens who imprint on other people (Viridian or otherwise) and form a bond with them. They also live their entire life cycle in about six Earth years.
> 
> 2\. In each series, a different character is a Viridian, who was raised by mean Klingons on an outpost. An Enterprise crewmember is captured by the Klingons and they inadvertently form a bond with the Viridian, who helps them escape. Then they return to rescue the Viridian and bring them aboard the Enterprise. The Viridian homeworld is contacted and the Enterprise crew learn the Viridian will most likely die if they are sent away. So they end up staying on the Enterprise, and the crewmember has to adjust.
> 
> 3\. The bad words are censored. That’s just how I do things.
> 
> I hope you enjoy this AU. I own nothing and appreciate the chance to play in this universe.

            "There's no need for you to go."

            "Hmmm, I think I should."

            "Really, Mal," Trip insisted, double-checking one of the bags in the Launch Bay, "there's no need. It's a very safe, secure, supervised campground. And I'll be with Jon and Travis." Mal's skeptical look indicated he didn't think those two officers were capable of providing the kind of security he demanded when it came to Trip. "You won't like it," Trip continued. "Hikin' through the woods all day—that's _outdoors_ , by the way—just to see the view from a hilltop at sunset, then eatin' whatever semi-edible substance Jon cooks up for dinner, then sleepin' on the _ground_ all night—"

            "Why are _you_ going?" Mal asked with confusion, nose wrinkling in displeasure.

            "Well, I like all those things," Trip assured him. "Except for Jon's cooking, I suppose. But I don't think _you're_ gonna like 'em, so why don't you just stay here? You can hang out with Hoshi for a couple days."

            "I want to come with _you_!" Trip rolled his eyes, about ready to give in—which he was certain Mal could sense, which peeved Trip even more. But how was a man supposed to stand up under that kind of pressure, anyway?

            "You won't like it," he warned again, but Mal knew he'd won.

            "Hooray, hooray, I'm going camping with Trip!" he sang, dancing around the Launch Bay, and Trip quickly looked up at the control panel to see if there were any witnesses to this.

            "Would you stop it?" Trip told him grumpily. "Camping is a serious business. We're gonna be out there in the wilderness, and you gotta be prepared for it."

            Mal nodded solemnly. "Did you say we would sleep on the _ground_?"

            Now that he wasn't trying to dissuade Mal from going anymore, Trip felt it wise to be more specific. "Well, actually, not _really_ on the ground," he clarified. He pointed to one rolled-up bundle on the floor of the Launch Bay. "See, we'll be in a _tent_ , and then inside the tent we'll have _sleeping bags_." He nudged the silver roll with his foot.

            "Ooh, a _sleeping bag_ ," Mal repeated excitedly. "That sounds nice. That sounds cozy. I should like to sleep in a bag with you, Trip."

            The engineer rolled his eyes, willing himself to be patient. "It's really more like a blanket folded over," he tried to explain. Mal blinked at him and Trip sighed. "Okay, let's go ahead and unroll one." Mal seemed enthusiastic about this idea.

            Trip loosened the bindings on one silver polymer sleeping bag and unrolled it on the floor of the Launch Bay for Mal to examine. "See, it's soft, like a blanket, and you get inside and sleep there," he pointed out.

            "Hmmm, hmmm, hmmm," Mal murmured, crawling over the bag. "How interesting. It will be so nice and cozy with the two of us in here!"

            "Uh, no, Mal," Trip corrected. "That's just for _one_ person." Seeing the protest rising in the other man's eyes, he hastened to add, "But we can fix our two bags together so two people can sleep in it."

            Mollified, Mal went back to poking at the sleeping bag. After a moment he found the opening and began to crawl curiously inside, head first. "Uh, no, Mal—" Trip started to comment, then, smirking, stopped himself. "You've got it right there, buddy, just keep going."

 

NOTE: This scene was going to end with Mal standing up with the sleeping bag over him when Jon and Travis enter the Launch Bay, tripping over it because he can’t see. Sophisticated humor, I know.

 

            It took several pokes to the shoulder to awaken Trip, and several more for him to realize the first ones weren't going away. "What?" he mumbled sleepily into the darkness.

            "Trip?"

            "What?" he asked again, more forcefully.

            "I have to go to the bathroom."

            Trip pried his eyes open, although there wasn't much light to see by. Mal was blinking at him a few centimeters away, lit only by the faint amount of moonlight soaking through the tent. "Well go then," Trip told him. "There's a whole woods out there." And this required Trip's involvement how?

            "I can't go out in the woods by myself."

            Trip sighed, a long, especially irritated sigh. They'd been hiking most of the day, digesting Jon's terrible campfire cooking most of the evening, and now he just really wanted to get some sleep before they did it all over again tomorrow. Trip loved camping and hiking. Truly. But only when he'd had enough rest.

            "Mal, I've seen ya take on warriors from half a dozen species and beat 'em all down. Now you're afraid a bear's gonna get ya?"

            Mal's eyes widened even further. "There are _bears_ out there?!"

            Okay, that was Trip's fault. But in his defense he wasn't thinking straight, because _he was so d—n tired_. "No, there's no bears," he corrected. "There's no dangerous animals out there. It's a campground. All you're gonna find are squirrels."

            For a brief instant he thought he'd won. "But it's dark."

            "So? Space is even darker."

            "Well I don't go out in _space_ , do I?" Mal pointed out, getting snippy. "Just come with me."

            "Fine." Trip immediately started shoving the warm sleeping bag off them and digging for his shoes. If he was going to do this, he was going to do it as quickly as possible. And then get back to sleep.

            "It's cold, you should take your jacket," Mal told him solicitously, holding it out to Trip. Trip was too mad to put it on. "And we should take flashlights. What about emergency flares? Maybe a couple of ration packs, just in case—"

            "How long are you plannin' to be out in the d—n woods peein'?" Trip snapped. "Get on with it!"

            A few minutes later Trip stood, shivering in his too-thin shirt, on one side of an enormous hedge, waiting and cursing. Why had Mal even come on this shore leave? He hated hiking and camping. Or rather, he'd never been, but Trip knew he _would_ hate it. He should have been more insistent that Mal stay on the ship. Sure, he would have missed Trip, a little, but then he could have spent his time doing whatever the h—l he liked to do for fun, and Trip could've spent his time hiking with Jon and Travis. It was only a few days, it wasn't like Trip would have left Mal alone for weeks or anything. But Trip acquiesced, because he didn't want to see Mal throw the fit to end all fits that Trip knew he was capable of. As he had before.

            And look what it had gotten him. Standing in the woods in the dark freezing his butt off.

            There was a movement from one side and Trip turned to see Jon emerge from a different clump of bushes, looking as surprised to see Trip as Trip was to see him.

            "Hey."

            "Hey."

            "Just... answering the call of nature," Jon offered, trying to rub some warmth back into his arms. "Um, am I interrupting?"

            "No," Trip sighed. "Nature ain't callin' me."

            "Then what are you doing out here?" As no sane person would just stand out in the woods on a night this cold.

            Trip smirked but it held no humor. "What's the only thing worse than having to get up in the middle of a cold night and go into the bushes?"

            Jon thought a moment, then it dawned on him. "Having to get up in the middle of a cold night because someone _else_ has to go into the bushes?" he guessed.

            "Right on."

            A rustle, and then Mal reappeared, liberally sanitizing his hands with the alcohol-based gel Phlox had given him. "Oh, hello, Captain," Mal remarked, as though there were nothing unusual in the meeting.

            "Hi, Mal," Jon replied. "Nice night, huh?"

            "Let's go back to bed," Trip snapped.

 

            "What I want to know is," Trip asked, voice trembling a little as he spoke, "is it good that he's here, so he can save us when bad things happen, or do bad things only happen because he's here, _then_ he saves us from them?"

            "Trip, shut up. That's an order." Jon knew one and only one Vulcan meditation technique, and that had been designed by T'Pol to help 'clear his mind' when some beautiful alien women had threatened to overwhelm him with their pheromone-producing ability (one of those little misadventures that had somehow not made it into his official Starfleet reports). Still, he was determined to apply it now, hoping maybe it would be just as effective against pain, frustration, and a little fear. Just a little fear. It seemed to go better if he had utter silence, though.

            "I mean, you and I have been on lots of camping trips," the engineer continued, heedless of his Captain's orders. Jon magnanimously decided he probably wouldn't write him up for it, considering Trip was slightly delusional at this point. "And none of them involved rock slides, carnivorous salmon, electrical storms, and poisonous pollen. At least," he amended, "not all at the same time."

            "I'm asking you as a friend, Trip. Please shut up." It was something about being on a turbulent ocean, and then someone in the boat with you told the waves to calm and they did, or maybe you had to throw someone overboard first... Were there dolphins involved? Jon had the feeling he was getting mixed up with several different stories from Earth mythology and religion. D—n, his leg hurt.

            "I mean, killer salmon," Trip went on. "That's just wacky. That's just weird."

            "He probably planted them," Jon groused.

            "I don't think you can plant salmon, Jon," Trip corrected dazedly. "They come from eggs or something. They come from caviar, don't they?"

            Jon rolled his eyes and wondered if trying to stand up again was at all a good idea. Or was at all a good idea in the sense that it would keep him from throwing rocks at Trip's head in order to silence him.

            Before he could attempt it he heard the thump of footsteps approaching and Mal and Travis bounded back into the clearing. "We got through to _Enterprise_ , sir!" Travis announced breathlessly.

            "How?" Jon demanded. Last he'd seen of their communicators they'd been smashed to bits under the tumbling rock.

            "Mal managed to repair one of the communicators enough to signal for help," Travis reported, trying to help Jon sit up a little more, or do whatever Jon was trying to do when he squirmed around. "He also found some more water. I've got it boiled and everything." He offered the canteen to Jon, who took it gratefully.

            Mal was wrapping himself around the engineer on the ground, trying to keep his shivering form warm. Trip burrowed into him almost against his will. "Do you have any caviar on ya?" he asked suspiciously--suspicion tinged with sleepiness.

            "No," Mal told him, not appearing surprised by the question. "Do you want some caviar when we get home? I don't know what it is, though." Trip resigned himself to silence, apparently feeling that warmth and comfort overrode whatever Mal might have done, in his mind, to cause their predicament. "Poor Trip," Mal cooed, petting the engineer's hair. "You're all cold. I'll get you nice and warm. And then the shuttlepod will come, and we can go back to the ship, and we'll have a nice, hot shower, and we'll never, _never_ go camping again..."

            Jon had seen Mal toss aside rocks bigger than his head like they were made of foam packing material, wade into a river (when he was terrified of the water) to beat down swarming flesh-eating salmon, and dash out into a lightning storm to collect electricity to power an emergency generator. All in the last two days. The fact that he was also immune to the poisonous pollen that had incapacitated Trip because of the anti-allergy injection Phlox had given him was, Jon felt, useful but not really of Mal's doing. Now he'd apparently managed to repair a communicator the Chief Engineer had given up as a lost cause (granted, a slightly hallucination-prone Chief Engineer) _and_ morph himself into a heated blanket. It was the cooing that really sent Jon over the edge, though. The cooing _and_ the petting. Jon wasn't sure he'd ever be able to erase that image from his mind. But he was sure as h—l going to try.

            "Travis," Jon said seriously, clutching the young ensign's arm.

            "Yes, sir?"

            "You're in command." And with that Jon promptly passed out.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry I didn't write more!


End file.
